"The freaky line" is an idea which Robert Scoble first coined in 2011 to describe the limit at which people will stop sharing information on the Internet and via social media. You may be happy to share photos of your dinner, your location, your marital status, what car you drive, your political allegiances, but probably not your salary or your inside leg measurement. I suspect the freaky line is movable - "Zuckerberg's law" which states that we will share twice as much about ourselves online next year as we did this year is probably true, and therefore makes the freaky line movable. I wonder if my 2008 self would think that I'd now happily share photos of my fantastic roast dinner or recent engagement quite so freely online.

I have begun to think that there is another "freaky line" which can be drawn at the point that an online service's utility is superceded by the intrusive nature of hyper-targeted advertising which features on it. People often complain about how re-targeted ads for products "follow them around" on the Internet for weeks after they innocently Google something once. Personally, if I see one more advert for "reasonably priced engagement rings", I'll scream...

I thought about this in relation to a new image-recognition based technology which can recognise brands and products online and then allow rival brands to target advertising at users based on the pictures they share. This may or may not cross the "freaky line" for users, but it will be interesting to see how this technology is applied by brands and marketers. I wonder if the freaky line for targeted advertising is as movable as it is for sharing, or whether people are less tolerant of advertising which seems to know more and more about you. Time will tell. But if anyone wants to buy an affordable engagement ring, drop me a line. I found a really great jewelers online.

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Cluep Pics lets marketers target people based on the images they publicly post on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and serve them ads in their mobile apps and mobile websites. It uses a proprietary image recognition engine that learns from every image it sees to identify brands, products, and scenarios to effectively engage people around their interests, activities, and lifestyle.